Andy Hayler

Have a good time in London, my home town. The restaurant scene in London is probably best in its diversity, with a wide variety of ethnic cuisines. You have limited time but a few ideas follow. Best fine dining experience: Ledbury or Hedone or The Ritz (but jacket and tie for that one) or Gordon Ramsay. Best Italian: Beck at Browns. Best Indian: Indian Accent. Best Chinese: Hakkasan for "posh" Chinese, Royal China Queensway for a more down to earth experience. Best pizza (at least near your hotel) is 50 Kalo di Ciro Salva. Best Spanish: Cambio de Tercio. Best pub food: Harwood Arms, which specializes in game, some of it shot personally by the owner. Enjoy your trip. Details of all these places with reviews and photos are on www.andyhayler.com --- Harwood Arms (zgast)

Cheers. To be honest I am not really qualified to answer this. I have a WSET advanced qualification in wine so am comfortable to talk about wine lists and wine pairing, but I don't know a great deal about cocktails I'm afraid. The other beverage that is interesting to pair with food is Japanese sake, which I am still learning about. I'll leave the cocktails to others that are more knowledgeable about them. Thanks Don. It has been very kind of you to invite me to participate in this forum and I would especially like to thank all the forum members that contributed so many interesting questions and responses to my answers. It has been a real pleasure and I would like to wish you all very happy dining in the future.

That one is in the 2019 guide (the 2019 season of guides has just started), and I will going there in the spring. I have only been a couple of times to Washington D.C., and last time I came I couldn't get in to minibar, so to be honest I am not sure. I did enjoy my time in DC, in particular at Komi. I will certainly do my best to try minibar and Pineapple and Pearls on my next trip. One thing about Michelin producing new guides is that it does encourage me to travel!

I have been travelling to the USA since the 1980s, and stopped counting my visits a long time ago when I passed 100 trips there. It is difficult to make sweeping generalisations as there will always be some exception or another to generic statements. However I was discussing this very subject with an American gourmet friend a while back and he observed that in general even the high-end US restaurants tend not to do desserts quite as well as top restaurants in France. To be fair the same statement could be made about just about any country, since a French pastry section in a top class restaurant like Pic in Valence is pretty much unmatched anywhere. Related to that he observed that he was often disappointed in bread in high-end US restaurants compared to France, though I have noticed that less than he had. Technically there are clearly fine chefs to be found anywhere, as can be seen with the inventiveness shown for example Alinea in Chicago. Beyond the pastry section issue I think it is tricky to generalise. In terms of Michelin, if we compare across countries then I think that although they supposedly have the same standards everywhere, in reality, the guides seem different in different countries, as I mentioned elsewhere in this forum. My observation with the US guides is that they tend to be on the generous side when dishing out stars compared to some other countries (Germany for example seems generally to be marked quite hard by Michelin, by way of contrast). Incidentally, I find the UK to be quite kindly marked too. It is easy to become patriotic about stars, and I have noticed in the UK that many chefs are overly enthusiastic about the standards in British restaurants compared to the reality that I encounter when I travel.

Good question. Personally, I find Indian cuisine to be one that is generally underrated, though to be fair the standard of it can be pretty ordinary outside India and the UK. If you travel to India you can experience the tremendous diversity of the regional cuisines, from coastal areas like Kerala and Goa through to the more rugged dishes of northern India (Punjab etc) through to the quite different dishes in the south and indeed the northeast of the country e.g. Bengali dishes. The sheer variety is impressive and is particularly good at finding creative ways to showcase vegetables. Doubtless everyone has their own favourite cuisine outside of the mostly French and Japanese places that dominate fine dining these days, but Indian is mine. If I had to eat just one cuisine for the rest of my life I would choose Indian, even though I recognise that there are no Indian restaurants (yet) that have really broken into the upper echelons of fine dining.

In short, no, I have no way of knowing the internal kitchen processes or staff practices of a restaurant. I am a diner and so can judge the end result on my plate, but have no clairvoyant ability to know whether a chef has an energy efficient approach, is good at recycling or is nice to his (or her) staff. I don't see how any outside dining inspection process, whether that be Michelin or another guide, could realistically be expected to have such insider knowledge. Such things are the purview of investigative journalism. Some things can be gleaned from authorities granted such access e.g. in the UK there is a food hygiene rating for every restaurant that is public, and you can look this up before you head to a particular place. This sometimes yields some interesting results, as I discovered a few years back after getting in after eating in a Michelin starred restaurant that turned out to have a surprisingly poor hygiene rating. However that is only possible because the hygiene inspectors have the authority to do surprise kitchen inspections.

The very same.

Indeed I rate "meals". Some restaurants I return to regularly, and in such cases you will find many reviews e.g. The Ritz in London. Of course it would be ideal to go to a restaurant many times before writing a review, but as you say that is impractical unless you have a whole team of inspectors like Michelin, and as we have seen that causes its own issues of inconsistency. I think that a single visit to a restaurant is enough to form an opinion, even though multiple visits would be ideal. Food is supposed to be consistent at a restaurant from service to service, and the higher up the dining scale you go then the more true this is. Sometime I will return to a place where I had a poor meal if enough of my readership suggest that the experience I had was unusual. Sadly it often transpires that a place that can deliver one poor meal is perfectly capable of delivering another one. As an aside, that dish pictured was indeed a joy to eat, and every chef I have shown it to has been impressed with the knife skills required.

1. In terms of change, there has definitely been a move towards lighter dishes. I recall eating around France in the mid 1990s and there was so much butter and cream that it felt like the restaurants had been sponsored by an association of cardiac surgeons. This has changed a lot, and now top French restaurants like Pic employ much lighter sauces. Another change has been the spread of international influence, partly influenced or enabled by the internet. Now a chef can see pictures of a dish just about anywhere, and many are swift to borrow ideas from the other side of the world. In recent years this has meant that a great many high-end restaurants n Europe and the US have been influenced by Asia, and especially Japan, with Japanese ingredients and techniques popping up all over the place. An example is in 3 star Christian Bau's restaurant Schloss Berg in Germany, where some dishes could pass for Japanese, and yet the chef has actually not worked there. 2. This is an excellent question. Over the years I have built up a good contact network of foodie pals, whether bloggers, professional food writers or enthusiasts. I try that network first e.g. if in Rome then Katie Parla has great local knowledge, If you are not plugged into these personal networks then you need to try other guides. The "Top 50" is well known but is by definition limited to a small number of places, and anyhow rewards a certain type of modernist, trendy restaurant. In some countries then Gault Millau is good (e.g. Austria, where Michelin pulled out due to poor sales). There is also the online site "Opinionated about dining", run by a New Yorker, a voting site where thousands of gourmets contribute votes. Then there are many blogs, but of course depending on where you are talking about the specifics will vary. In some countries, there are well established local guides, like Gambero Rosso in Italy or The Good Food Guide in the UK. Finally, there are the crowd-sourced sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor, though these can be dubious e.g. the top places on Tripadvisor in London are mostly nonsensical.

I would choose pizza in my "sin food" category. I wouldn't say that "even bad pizza is good" by any means, but it is at least usually edible.

This is a good question to ask but a tricky one to answer. In terms of the absolute best sushi I would say that Sushi Saito is top. People in Tokyo agree with me, since it has a near perfect 4.89/5 score on Tabelog the main Japanese restaurant website, and is the highest rated on the site in the city, out of 4,190 (!) sushi restaurants in the city. The next best to that for me has been Sushi Arai, which I went to recently. It is a rising star with a young chef and is "only" 7th out of 4,190, but for me was essentially indistinguishable in standard from Saito, and will doubtless rise in the rankings in time as its reputation grows. As it happens Saito speaks pretty good English. Many of the Japanese sushi chefs speak some English, but are often rather shy about speaking it, so they understand more than they appear to. However there are not many, like Saito, that speak it well. However Saito's stellar reputation means that getting a reservation is now nightmarish, as to be honest it is at most of the highly rated sushi places, including Arai, as well as others like Sawada. The only way around this is to sign up for one of the various paid concierge services who have arrangements with the restaurants to deal with the occasional inevitable cancellation. By nature these are unpredictable but they do happen, and if you are flexible in terms of your travel dates then you will be able to find a way in even to Saito through this route, eventually. Alternatively try for a slightly less popular place like Sushi Yoshitake (also 3 Michelin star, but with a mere 4.23 on tabelog) where your odds improve of getting a reservation. I wouldn't factor in the English skills too much since the chefs will at the least know the names of the fish in English that they present to you. I remember in one place that they kindly brought out a little book on fish and the waitress turned it to the correct page with each new course that appeared.

Thanks for the question. I only score the food in my reviews. Service is such a personal thing (one person's "attentive" is another's "intrusive") and is going to vary more from waiter to waiter, from service to service, than the food ever should. Naturally service is a key part of the overall dining experience, and certainly charming service can greatly enhance the enjoyment of an evening in a restaurant, just as bad service can spoil it. I was given a bit of training on how to write professional reviews way back in 1990, and the one thing that was drilled into me was to separate the food from the service, as the two things are separate. When I find diners reporting a bad experience in a restaurant, in 90% of cases they complain about a waiter or the table they were given, or some other service issue. It is rare indeed for me to get a comment saying "the turbot was slightly overcooked and under seasoned" - it is almost always service issues that stick in the mind of most consumers. I like all sorts of low brow food: pizza, sandwiches, curries, tonkatsu in Japan, you name it. Well made simple food can be just as enjoyable as a tasting menu, and a lot cheaper.

Hi there. I have certainly had some disappointing three star meals. A place called Hamadaya in Tokyo was incomprehensibly given three stars in the first Tokyo Michelin guide, but they demoted it quite quickly. I would say that 3 star Gaon in Seoul was my most disappointing overall though. It was desperately ordinary food e.g. Jerusalem artichoke porridge and chewy octopus, but at wild prices. I paid $349 per head for my meal, including a small bottle of Estrella beer at $23.

I think it is a blend of things. Certainly there are some geographical and climate issues, so it is easier to grow top notch tomatoes in southern Italy than it is in, say, the UK. Such differences cause cuisines to adapt e.g. in Scandinavia many vegetables are fermented and pickled because of the short growing season in their climate. One aspect though would be a history and culture of food e.g. in Emilia Romagna you find Parmesan, balsamic vinegar, Parma ham etc, and there is a tradition of prizing these things and valuing them. Another factor is economic. A restaurant of any kind is a luxury, and so for restaurants to thrive there have to be enough customers willing to pay for that experience. However it is not a straight correlation, or places like Qatar and Luxembourg would be crammed full of great restaurants. For a restaurant environment to thrive you need sufficient people willing to spend money on food, combined with good ingredients and a culture or history that values food. You see that in Japan, where even the strawberries in local supermarkets are superior to the ones I can buy at top delis in the UK, and where there is a great depth of food culture, with people willing to spend their spare money on food at all levels.

When reviewing restaurants I simply rate the food experience; as a diner I have absolutely no way of knowing what the working environment of a particular restaurant is like. Obviously, everyone wants staff to work in a positive, respectful environment, and every normal person wants people to have equal opportunity to progress. As a reviewer, though, I simply cannot tell whether a head chef or owner is promoting a positive, nurturing environment to their staff or not. Certainly there are not enough female restaurateurs and head chefs, so it is always a pleasure to review good restaurants that happen to have a female or ethnic minority head chef.

Thanks for the question Lisa. 1. My favourites by continent are: North America: Alinea in Chicago; Europe - Les Pres d'Eugenie in south west France; in Asia, Mizai in Kyoto. I like the creativity and energy of Alinea. For Mizai I love the precision and ultra-seasonality as well as gorgeous presentation. For Les Pres d'Eugenie, my overall favourite, it is more complex, as it is not just the food, great though it is. I love the fact that the chef Michel Guerard is still in the kitchen at every service, despite being 84 years old. I love the simplicity and purity of the dishes, where you rarely see more than three elements on a plate, and the ability of the cooking to draw out the maximum flavour from the lovely produce. It also happens to be a charming, country setting. 2. I particularly like French food at the high end of dining, so assuming I couldn't cheat by having a tasting menu, I would have a starter involving langoustines, a fish dish with sea bass, a main course with venison and a citrus dessert like a classic lemon tart.

In theory, Michelin should apply the same criteria to anywhere. They have certainly included places that do not fit the stereotypes in recent years. Sushi Saito was, until fairly recently, located in what looked like a janitor's closet inside a multi-storey car park, with six seats along a wooden counter, and yet that had 3 Michelin stars. There are other examples too. It may be that in France, which has had Michelin around the longest, that there is a deeper set of expectations that restaurateurs (and diners) have about non-food aspects, and so the restaurants cater to those expectations. Some will get stars, some not. However it is indeed harder to think of "unusual" starred places in France than it is in some of the newer guides.

Some starred restaurants seem themselves as being creative e.g. Alinea in Chicago, or Mugaritz in Spain. Others try to reproduce classic dishes, perhaps with seasonal variations but with relatively little menu variation. Ambroisie in Paris is an example of a classical restaurant, and the late Paul Bocuse's restaurant in Lyon is basically still cooking dishes from the 1970s. In order to achieve consistency, some restaurants have extremely stable menus, ignoring seasonality, such as the Fat Duck in the UK. By contrast, in Japan the high end kaiseki restaurants are ultra-seasonal, and their menu changes practically week to week based on what ingredients are at their peak. Hence I think that it varies quite a bit. On your second point, to generalise I think that France and Germany have the highest density of really top class 3 star restaurants, with few duds. The standard is generally very high across Japan too. The lowest quality 3 star restaurants, for me, are those featured in some of the recent Asian guides sponsored by tourist boards e.g. those in Seoul, and some of the places in Hong Kong.

Sure Don, I definitely don't eat Michelin starred meals day in and day out. On average I dine out four times or so per week unless I am travelling, and when at home I tend to have a sandwich or salad and fruit for lunch. I am definitely keen to find simple but good places that cook well without being flashy. In Tokyo I often try tonkatsu restaurants for example, which basically do deep fried pork in breadcrumbs with shredded cabbage and barbecue style sauce. I am just as happy eating that kind of food, or for example a pizza, as I am eating tasting menus at smart restaurants. In terms of Indian food, I would say that the best Indian restaurants are, unsurprisingly, in India, but that the next best place for them is the UK. This is mostly due to the deep historical links between UK and India and the sheer number of restaurants to choose from. Nobody really knows the figure, but Tripadvisor has over 1,200 Indian restaurants listed in London, for example. Zaika is still there but is not what it used to be, and I recall Malabar and Woodlands. These days the best in London is, in my view, Indian Accent, but there are many other excellent indian restaurants around, many of them not in central London. For example there is a terrific place called Dastaan out in the suburbs, and The Brilliant in Southall, which is an area with a very high Asian population. My wife and I go to The Brilliant and a couple of other places in Southall as our "go to" Indian places.

Excellent question. Michelin would claim that their standards are the same globally but I would say this is not true. There may be a number of reasons for this. Until 2004 Michelin were just in Europe in terms of their restaurant coverage. I gather that at the two and three star level there is some sort of internal QA review e.g. a place in Spain cannot be promoted to two stars unless an inspector from another country signs it off. Assuming this is true then it can be seen to be quite practical in Europe given the small distances, and probably a good idea. However such an approach would be very expensive indeed if it was extended globally, and the Michelin Guides are without doubt under financial pressure. There have been a few articles about this and at one point a few years ago they were losing many millions a year. Although the Michelin tyre corporation regards the guides as a PR expense, they will nonetheless not be allowed to spend willy-nilly. Indeed this is almost certainly what is behind the recent trend towards their taking money from tourist boards to do a guide, as happened with Seoul, Bangkok (both these are well documented) and almost certainly others. Hence I doubt that Michelin employ the same level of internal QA globally that they do in Europe. An example of this is in Hong Kong, where a restaurant called Sun Tung Lok, went from no stars to three in a year, and then was immediately demoted. This would have been unthinkable in the old days, where even legendary restaurants like Jamin and Louis XV went from one star to two and then to three. The inspection teams in the newer guides may also be less experienced, though doubtless there is a degree of cross-border inspection for new guides. Whatever the explanation, the standards seem to vary. The Hong Kong guide has been notoriously volatile and, in my view, unreliable. The same team presumably did the new Shanghai guide, which included some really shocking restaurants at the two star level. I have less issues with the Japan guides, though in the beginning they also made bloopers like giving Hamadaya in Tokyo 3 stars, which they at least quickly fixed the following year. The Japan team is, I believe, now entirely Japanese except for one French inspector, so does not have a "French bias" as some newspaper articles have claimed. It may also help that the standard of restaurants in Japan is generally very high, so it is rare to get a really bad meal at almost any level. Even within Europe there are some curiosities e.g. George Blanc still retains 3 stars as he is a bit of a culinary icon in France, yet virtually no diners that I know reckon it to be close to 3 star level. In general Michelin seem slow to give stars and slow to take them away, though this seems to be changing a bit recently. In my own opinion you can group the current 124 three star places into three buckets. There are about two dozen world class restaurants, a dozen or so shockers that seem to me just errors, and the bulk are in the middle. These three star restaurants are mostly better than the average two star, but are a step down from the real world-beaters. I have noticed that in recent years many of the newer three stars have been in this bracket, with very few indeed that I would say would deserve to be in the "true" three star bracket - it may be that they are simply running out of new genuinely top class restaurants to promote, yet feel the need to do so anyway to generate guide sales and/or headlines..

Thanks for your question. I am definitely interested, when travelling, in trying local cuisine rather than just glitzy places aimed at wealthy international travellers. For example, when in the Black Forest recently I enjoyed some local Bavarian dishes like Swabian pork with sauerkraut and mustard at Sattelei. In both Shanghai and Taipei recently I tried several versions of xiao long bao, the soup dumpling with a liquid centre, which is a local favourite. I particularly liked some grilled sardines at a taverna called To Psaraki. I like most cuisines so I am not necessarily drawn to any one, though I am especially keen on Indian food so I am always pleased if I can find a good curry on my travels.

Thanks for your question. Restaurant criticism is not a science, but there are some factors that most of us can probably agree are important in a dining experience, other than service, price and ambience. In terms of assessing food, I look for: ingredient quality, technical skill, presentation and the balance of the ingredients and flavours. Michelin are cagey about their criteria but in interviews have said that they look for ingredient quality, technical skill and balance (they call it "skill in their preparation and the combination of flavours",), creativity, consistency and value for money). Other interviews with Michelin have mentioned the personality of the chef coming through, whatever that means. However there is a decent amount of overlap here. There is no magic "tipping point" that makes a restaurant two stars as distinct from one star or three. It is just an arbitrary cut off point that Michelin apply. It is worth saying that Michelin repeatedly claim that their assessment is "only about the food", so those expensive wine glasses, smooth waiters and starched tablecloths are, at least in theory, irrelevant. There are about four times as many two stars at three stars, and five times as many one star places as there are two stars, to give a sense of the size of the bands. All that Michelin say is that a one star restaurant is a "good restaurant in its category", two stars is "worth a detour" and three stars is "worth a special journey". Michelin claim that their criteria are identical globally, though having eaten at all of their 3 star places I would disagree with this. That is a topic in itself, but it is fair to say that a lot of people think that the Asian guides (outside of Japan) seem to be quite inconsistent and in some cases wildly generous with their stars relative to, say, Europe. It is perhaps unfortunate that Michelin have started to produce guidebooks at the behest of tourist boards, who pay for the guides - this is the case with Seoul, Bangkok, Shanghai, etc, as that further raises suspicions that Michelin's impartiality may be suspect.

Hi Simon. Perhaps the best example of a cluster would be San Sebastian in Spain. Here you have a trio of three star restaurants and a 2 star place. San Sebastian is a good example because it actually has a lot of depth in its cuisine, with a huge number of pintxos (tapas) bars, and other excellent restaurants in and around the city. My favourite restaurant there is a place called Ibai, which has fantastic ingredients cooked simply. I actually prefer Ibai to the multi-starred restaurants of the city. The greatest concentration of stars globally in a small area is to be found in the tiny village of Baiersbronn in the Black Forest, where you have a pair of excellent three star restaurants as well as a two star in a little country place, as well as some other good local restaurants. For ingredients-led restaurants you can consider the two turbot restaurants of Getaria in Spain called Elkano and Kaia Kaipe, who specialise in whole turbot charcoal grilled in the open air. They are not so far from Etxebarri, where local ingredients like red prawns are grilled over various types of charcoal. Naturally you can find such places in Italy. One of my favourites is Don Alfonso 1890 on the Amalfi Coast. this restaurant has its own farm opposite Capri and grows the best tomatoes I have ever tasted. There are also plenty of such restaurants in Japan, where specialisation is taken to extremes. For example in Tokyo a number of restaurants, such as Nodaiwa, serve only eel, prepared in various ways. Other restaurants serve just crab, and there are more examples like this. Japan is also famous for its beef restaurants. For example Aragawa in Kobe serves Kobe beef, and in fact only a sub-species of Kobe cattle called Sendai.

Thanks for your question Keithstg. Assuming that social media got going properly around 2004 with Facebook, then I think there have been a few effects. The popularity of people taking photos of dishes on their phones and posting them e.g. to Instagram, seems to have done a couple of things. Firstly it has caused many chefs to rethink dish presentation, and to think more about how the dish looks rather than just how it tastes. You can see this a lot in Scandinavian cuisine, with considerable use of edible flowers to decorate plates, and artfully tweezered wood sorrel and the like to make dishes pretty and to appeal to social media. Another effect is indirect, with new dish ideas travelling instantly from location to location via social media. This has meant that an idea for a dish in (say) Tokyo can rapidly find its way on to a plate in Chicago or Rome. It no longer requires a cookbook to be published for dish ideas to be adapted elsewhere. To take one example, Michel Bras is famous for a vegetable dish he called gargouillou, which involves dozens of vegetables, herbs and flowers prepared in assorted ways (some raw, some pickled, some cooked) and assembled on the plate. I have eaten versions of this dish all over the world, with or without acknowledgement to Bras. This kind of spreading of dish ideas has become much more rapid since the advent of social media. I suppose one additional change is that I no longer get looked at oddly by restaurant staff when I take pictures of my meal!

Thanks for your question Don, and for inviting me to this forum. I am delighted to be here, and would like to thank the readership of this site for already preparing some excellent questions. Don has been kind enough to introduce me, but just to summarise. I am a restaurant critic that has been fortunate enough to have travelled widely, and have at various times since 2004 been to every 3 star Michelin restaurant in the world. My recent trip to Japan meant that I have been to every 3 star restaurant in the 2018 guides, though of course the 2019 season is now upon us, with the Inn at Little Washington being promoted in the 2019 Michelin guide to Washington D.C. - I will visit that restaurant in the spring. I have had a career combining food with technology, and live in London with my wife Stella, a physician. To begin with your question on vegetable dishes. Some high end restaurants are noted for their vegetable dishes, such as 3 star Arpege in Paris, where Alain Passard at one time went entirely vegetarian on his menu, though he relents these days with the odd meat dish. He has two dedicated gardens in the countryside that supply the restaurant, so has a lot of control of his vegetable supply chain. I think that to experience really top class vegetarian dishes that you need to start with very high grade ingredients, as indeed could be said of any dish.In my experience the highest quality vegetables are to be found in the Mediterranean and in Japan. If you are ever in the south of France then pop into the markets along the coast, such as Cannes, or across the Italian border in Ventimiglia, to see just how superb the vegetables are there. The 3 star Louis XV in Monaco takes advantage of these nearby markets, and is another restaurant that over the years has produced some top quality vegetable dishes. Japan is interesting because they have a deep food culture that supports a lot of farmers that strive for the pinnacle of quality, and have enough diners prepared to pay for meals that involve them. When visiting Tokyo people often visit the tuna auctions at the huge fish market Tsukiji (which is about to move locations) but I was just as impressed by the vegetable market next door. The quality of vegetables and fruit in Japan, whether it be tomatoes or aubergines or amazing strawberries and peaches, is unsurpassed in my view. Japanese cuisine involves relatively little meat, so there are plenty of restaurants that showcase these products. One in particular that impressed me was Nakahigashi in Kyoto, where the chef has been foraging herbs many years before Noma in Copenhagen existed. In terms of sheer variety of vegetarian dishes, though, I would agree with Don that India would be my choice. I have travelled to India over twenty times and had the chance to sample a dazzling variety of dishes across its numerous regions, each of which has its own culinary identity. No other country has such a dramatic range of vegetarian dishes, prepared in all kinds of ways. Of course there are many other examples of restaurants across the world doing great things with vegetables, from Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns through to l'Enclume in Cumbria in the UK, to Bras in France and also its sister restaurant Bras on lake Toya in northern Japan.